New Adventure

Although many of you reading this title might think of a new adventure as having a new addition to the household, buying a new home, or even embarking on a new relationship. Well this "new adventure" is about embarking on a new relationship with food.

Last year I got pretty sick with an infection that was pretty serious. I feel thankful that I am living in a day and age with technology and medicines to make people better. Although the first infection went away, it decided to come and pester me a second time. Through all of this I had been on 3 different antibiotics twice. So 6 antibiotics were infesting my body over a 6 month period. If that is not enough to make someone feel extra yucky, we added pain medicine and muscle relaxants.

This experience only made my chronic gut problems become worse. Yippe!!! :-( It finally came to a point where the Dr decided it was time to do an exploratory surgery into my abdominal cavity to see if all my organ were "looking alright". Thankfully and sadly at the same time he found out that everything on the inside was healthy and in the right order. So gave me more drugs for the pain and told me to continue to take it easy, keep up with the physical therapy, and if its not better in 6 more weeks to see him again. Oh and that I needed to figure out my chronic gut problem because it may be making me worse. No kidding buddy! Between the drugs, antibiotics, anesthesia, inflammation and pain that my body was being racked with I am certain my gut was on the way to shut down mode.

Finally the drugs stop having the pain reducing effect that they are intended for...so in my logic, if its not working there is no point in taking them. Seriously. Little did I know how that would affect my body. I definitely list that under a dumb decision. Stopping cold turkey left my systems freaking out for two whole weeks! Hot and cold....hot and cold...cold and hot at the same time...sweats. crankies. and other things invaded my already off-balanced homeostasis. So my next move was to temporarily cut everything but fruits and veggies and a few grains. It still took two weeks for my stomach to react to the change. Then everything started to move better, I gained incredible amounts of energy for a sick and in pain person, some of the extreme bloating went away and all my random stomach cramps disappeared.

Once I thought my stomach was better I started trying to eat some of the normal things I used too.. well... that left me curled in a ball in my bed with intense stomach cramps. Who would have thought. Well apparently, my stomach has decided we must not be eating wheat anymore. I have been in an experimental mode on it for the last month and investigating what the diet change would involve... and not to mention the expenses if I were to buy everything instead of making it from scratch. This week has been the final straw... On Saturday after a few days of eating no gluten at all, at work I decided to try a sample of some of our new pastries. Seriously, 3 small bites, and I was in pain for two days!

 "That's it", I thought to myself, enough is enough. And thus starts the new adventure.

My wonderful husband is willing to go along with almost anything as long as our food includes a lot of meat, because "He's a man and must eat meat." So no vegetarian adventures in my future, just lots of protein, healthy fats, fruits, veggies, and experiments with new kinds of flour.

This morning I found a recipe for waffles, no flour at all. Well, they were good for the most part, but only containing almond butter(instead of peanut butter), eggs, vanilla, honey, and yogurt...they were too dry and unfluffy. So that is one out of a million internet recipes weeded out. The search is on! :-)